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David Campos for assembly, Wendy Aragon for City College board, soda, Muni money and the anti-speculation tax round out a controversial list of election 2014 ENDORSEMENTS. Plus: Yarrr, it's the Treasure Island Music Fest! And a new book collects George Kuchar's shouts and murmurs. Articles Online | Digital Edition

You received the assignment to bring the wine for Thanksgiving... maybe not as difficult as cooking a turkey, but you want to bring something special without having to give it too much thought. Here are a few last-minute bottle suggestions from various parts of the world and a range of prices. Most can be found at shops like Bi-Rite, K&L Wine Merchants, and Jug Shop.

Before our car ride home discussion of some of our favorite parts of the show, my friend and I had already agreed on something; holy shit that was loud. Playing to a sold-out crowd in its first of two back-to-back San Francisco shows (10/29), Deerhunter put on a raw, visceral, sometimes loose but often amazing set that pierced through the relatively small confines of the Great American Music Hall. Read more »

Hello vegetarians. I'm checking in for quick sec – are we braving the snarky Tofurky asides and dietary litigation with the extended fam well this year? I hopes.

The holidays can be a trickily-navigated time for the meatless maverick – but they also present a sweet opportunity to show your loved ones that this whole rejection of the agro-business line can be both heart and belly-warming. Call it culinary evangelism if you must. Read on for some gems from the newest crop of vegan and vegetarian cookbooks that'll have everyone at the table giving thanks. Read more »

The California Supreme Court let stand Nov. 23rd a landmark ruling protecting small business from predatory chains, denying without comment an attempt by SF Weekly and its chain parent to get the high court to hear the case.

The decision brings to an end more than two years of appeals by the Weekly and Village Voice Media and effectively concludes the legal case.Read more »

Walt Disney was right all along: dreams do come true. That is, if you’re Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore, and your dream is to be in an animated Disney movie. Levi and Moore star as Flynn and Rapunzel in Tangled, a fresh adaptation of the fairy tale about the princess with way too much hair. While Levi admits an affinity for Aladdin, Moore was always an Ariel fan.

“For our generation, I feel like that’s what every girl wanted to be,” Moore says. “What little girl doesn’t dream of being a Disney princess?” Both actors were also thrilled to be working with noted (and Academy Award-winning) Disney composer Alan Menken. Levi expressed a lifelong devotion to 1992's Newsies, though he’s a fan of Menken’s other work as well.

“[Working with Alan Menken] is bucket list,” Levi says. “It’s crazy, crazy bucket list. We both grew up knowing and singing all the songs to Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin.”

Moore continues, “I just found out he did Little Shop of Horrors last night, and I about lost it.”

The clerk of the Board of Supervisors, at the request of Board President David Chiu, has released a proposal for the selection process for a new mayor, and it's about as complicated and confusing as everyone expected. That's in part the result of the vagueness of the City Charter, which simply specifies that a vacancy in the office of mayor shall be filled by a San Francisco registered voter chosen by a majority of the supervisors but offers no procedural clues on how to get there. Read more »

The last time the Board of Supervisors had to pick a mayor, things were very different. Former Sup. Dan White had just murdered Mayor George Moscone and Sup. Harvey Milk. The city was in shock. Board President Dianne Feinstein became acting mayor, and one week later, on Dec. 4, six of her colleagues -- the narrowest possible margin -- elected her to fill out Moscone’s term.Read more »

This is a truly enjoyable (if a little off-base) video about the selection process for the next mayor. I particularly like the part about the duties of the acting mayor. Check it out after the jumpRead more »

Today we talk about the anger over full-body scans and patdowns at airports -- and why the critics are missing the point. Body scans are far less intrusive than the sort of data mining, wiretaps and assaults on personal privacy that go on every single day in both the public and private sector. Listen after the jump. Read more »

“I brought my costume, it's in this bag. Well except for the pants.” The song and dance man of the Bay's vaudevillian acid bordello, Broadway Freddie (aka Miguel Strong, or Michael if you're trying to get technical about it) is already seated at a corner table at the Right Spot Cafe when I arrive to chat about Yard Dog Road Show's first headlining show in San Francisco in years (The Independent, Sat/20).

This year's Indy Spirits Expo, which took place 11/17, was much improved since last year's inaugural festivity, though crammed into the cool, brick-walled nightclub space of The Mighty. This event offers one of the better opportunities I've seen to sample everything from cachaca and pisco, to absinthe and eaux de vie, all in one room, among the best small batch spirits happening in the US and a few places beyond. Read more »

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

The nation's crumbling infrastructure is in very serious need of rebuilding. There's absolutely no doubt about that.

Miles and miles of roads, highways and airport runways need to be repaired or replaced, as do miles and miles of railroad track. Many bridges and other public structures need to be fixed. So do many streets and many street lights, many water and flood control systems, many park and recreation and port facilities' high speed train systems need developing and so does very much more that's vital to our daily lives. Read more »

A rare flying object has been spotted this weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, namely Cynthia Hopkins, as intergalactic space pilot Ruom Yes Noremac, a post-human “Druoc” in a floppy silver space suit hovering high above the stage of the Novellus Theatre. She’s returning from the far distant future to, what?, “save the earth, of course.”

The Success of Failure (Or, the Failure of Success), making its Bay Area premiere tonight and tomorrow, makes up part three of the wildly inventive Accidental Trilogy developed by New York–based artist-musician Hopkins and company Accinosco. I caught it last night, and while a full review will have to wait until next week, I can say that the sight of her twirling there before a sprawling spacescape projected across an enormous screen — in a comical operetta musing on “the pros and cons of evolution,” above a stage aglow and twinkling with arch sci-fi phantasmagoria, and in an all-pervading atmosphere of nostalgia and regret — seemed indeed to defy a certain gravity through the power of deft spectacle and ethereal song.

Apparently, even the massive, all-powerful aliens and scumdogs of the universe known as GWAR have trouble with reception on their iPhones.

While conducting a phone interview before a show in Hollywood, band leader Oderus Urungus’ connection cut out twice, leaving him grumbling, “Maybe I’m clutching my iPhone too tightly!”

Perhaps it was his giant claws proving to be too much for our puny human technology to handle — either way, once the connection was re-established, the intergalactic beast that has led GWAR for more than a quarter century had no shortage of hilarious and outrageous things to say.

Having just finished taping a segment for the Fuel TV show Daily Habit, Oderus was being informed that he had revealed a bit more of himself to the television audience than he had thought. “I just did the show apparently with my balls hanging out the entire time and nobody told me! That’s not like a big thing for Oderus, my balls usually are hanging out — but to try to get on national TV, I’m willing to do the ball tuck, but apparently the ball tuck didn’t work, it was horrible, it looked like a duck-billed platypus coming out of a burrow or something!”